May 27Th ALGOL 58 Meeting
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NELIAC, and the much-loved The dungeons featured many ALGOL 60 [Jan 11]. In addition, novel creatures, objects, and May 27th Communications of the ACM locations, which became famous employed ALGOL-like notation in years to come, including the to describe algorithms for many ferocious but light-fearing grues, ALGOL 58 Meeting years. zorkmids, and Flood Control Dam #3. May 27 - June 2, 1958 Specifically for ALGOL 58, John Backus developed Backus Ex-members of the MIT group A meeting was held at ETH normal form for describing formed Infocom [June 22] in Zurich (the Swiss Federal programming languages. It was 1979, and their first commercial Institute of Technology) to revised and expanded by Peter game was a rewritten Zork [Dec combine two language proposals Naur [Oct 25] for ALGOL 60, and 00], divided into three parts. – one from the Association for at Donald Knuth’s [Jan 10] Computing Machinery (ACM suggestion renamed Backus- [Sept 15]), the other from the Naur form (BNF). Electronic Arts Gesellschaft für Angewandte Mathematik und Mechanik (GAMM). The attendees included Founded John Backus [Dec 3] and Alan Zork Begins May 27 (or 28), 1982 Perlis [April 1] from the ACM, May 27, 1977 and Friedrich L. Bauer [June 10] William Murray “Trip” Hawkins and Heinz Rutishauser from the Zork was one of the earliest III left his job at Apple as GAMM. interactive fiction games, Director of Strategy and inspired by the granddaddy of Marketing to found the video The result was ALGOL, although the genre, “Colossal Cave game company, Amazin’ that name wasn't officially Adventure” [March 11]. Software. It later became adopted for another year. The Electronic Arts (EA), to reflect report produced after the The first version of Zork was the idea that its game meeting called it IAL (short for written on a PDP-10 [March 22] developers were “software “International Algebraic between May 1977 and Feb. artists”. Language”), which Perlis called 1979 using the MDL an “‘unspeakable’ and pompous (pronounced Muddle) acronym”. language. The authors – Tim Anderson, Marc Notably, the ACM group didn't Blank, Bruce Daniels, suggest FORTRAN [Feb 26] as a and Dave Lebling – suitable language, even though were members of MIT's FORTRAN’s creator, John Dynamic Modeling Backus, was a member. The ACM Group. wanted a language independent The original Electronic Arts logo of any one company (i.e. MDL was LISP-based [April 15], (1982), which was often separate from IBM in and its built-in support for confused for EOA or LOA. In fact, FORTRAN’s case). strings allowed for longer and it's meant to be three shapes, more complex commands than not letters. During 1958 and 1959, in “Adventure”. For example, it proposals for improvements to wasn’t just limited to simple ALGOL 58 were published in the Hawkins was especially keen on verb-noun commands (“hit Communications of the ACM football games, having designed troll”), but also recognized some journal, and the ALGOL Bulletin, a board game called “Accu-Stat prepositions and conjunctions and a ALGOL 60 conference was Pro Football” in 1970, and coded (“hit the troll with the Dwarf held on [Jan 11] 1960 in Paris. a football game in BASIC as a axe”). school project in 1973. This led Most of the American proposals It was a common practice among to EA releasing “John Madden were related to adding more the group to name unfinished Football” in 1988, the first in a types, and input and output programs “zork,” a hacker word very long-lived franchise. facilities. The European meaning total destruction. So of However, after nine years as proposals were focused on the course they named the game CEO, Hawkins left to form 3DO procedure concept and the “Zork” thinking they'd change it [Oct 4] to develop console scope of variables. later; they didn’t. hardware. ALGOL 58 was never used much Zork was set in “the ruins of an In the 1990's, EA was the first for actual programming, but its ancient empire lying far publisher to release yearly design heavily influenced later underground”, and the player's updates of its sports franchises languages; it was the basis for mission was to “venture into this with new player rosters, JOVIAL (Jules’ Own Version of dangerous land in search of including for Madden NFL, FIFA, the International Algebraic wealth and adventure”. NHL, NBA Live, Tiger Woods, Language), MAD [Aug 26], and others. The company 1 received some flack for this Koichi Sugiyama composed the content management system since the actual gameplay music. (CMS). It began as a fork of changed little between the Michel Valdrighi's b2/cafelog, The North American version releases. developed in 2001. Christine featured many changes from the Tremoulet, a friend of In Nov. 2004, EA came under the original, including RAM save Mullenweg, suggested the name spotlight for its work practices. games, different character WordPress. Today, its noted for The “EA Spouse” blog, written by sprites ,and pseudo-Elizabethan its very large collection of Erin Hoffman, claimed that “the English style dialog. plugins based around the idea of current mandatory hours are 9 Dragon Quest is often compared programming hooks, called am to 10 pm, seven days a week, with the Final Fantasy series, by actions and filters, developed by with the occasional Saturday Hironobu Sakaguchi [Nov 25]. Ryan Boren in 2004. evening off for good behavior (at The two competed for much the 6:30pm).” The current release is version same market until the game 5.7 (codenamed “Esperanza”). In April 2012, The Consumerist companies’ merged in 2003. All the main releases since 1.0 awarded EA the title of “Worst have been named after jazz Company in America” along with musicians. Esperanza Emily its coveted “Golden Poo” trophy. Spalding is an American jazz Indeed, EA beat out some very The Cathedral and bassist, singer, songwriter, and strong competition from AT&T composer. and Walmart. In April 2013, EA the Bazaar won the award for a second time May 27, 1997 in a row, the first company to achieve this acolade. At the Linux Kongress, Eric Raymond [Dec 4] presented a talk on software engineering methods entitled “The Cathedral Dragon Quest and the Bazaar". It was based on his observations of the Released development of the Linux kernel May 27, 1986 and his experience managing the Fetchmail project. Dragon Quest was the first title In 1999, he expanded the talk in a series of fantasy role- into a book of the same name, playing games (RPG) which is which has since come to be currently at version XI, not regarded as something of a counting numerous spin-offs, manifesto for the open source Esperanza Spalding (2009), and ports to multiple consoles. movement [Feb 3]. Photo by Andrea Mancini. CC The game was released in Japan BY-SA 4.0 Raymond argues that the for the Famicom, but debuted on “cathedral” model of software the NES [Oct 18] in the US as development is led by a small “Dragon Warrior”. The name group of master coders with change was to avoid infringing DECWAR the trademark of the tabletop fixed ways of doing things. By comparison, the “bazaar” game, DragonQuest. May 27, 2011 involves a decentralized team of The game's creator, Yuji Horii, programmers whose only DECWAR was a multiplayer real- took inspiration from earlier qualification is their ability to time space battle game for up to RPGs such as Wizardry [Sept 00] get the job done. 18 users, coded in a mix of and Ultima [Aug 24], and his MACRO-10 (PDP-10 [Nov 00] A thought-provoking alternative own 1983 title “The Portopia assembly language) and model, entitled “The Circus Serial Murder Case” (which was FORTRAN IV [Dec 00] at the Midget and the Fossilized somewhat like “Mystery House” University of Texas at Austin in Dinosaur Turd”, can be found at [May 5]). 1978. http://fringe.davesource.com/F One of Horii's aims was to ringe/Computers/Philosophy/C It wasn’t the first multiplayer create a RPG that didn’t rely on athedral_Bazaar/Parody.html game (see PLATO’s Empire [May previous experience with 00]), but it was one of the first, Dungeons & Dragons [July 27] and highly influential. Copies which could appeal to a wider could be purchased on tape for range of players. WordPress $50, and it soon started popping up on PDP-10s around the Manga artist and Dragon Ball May 27, 2003 world. creator Akira Toriyama Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little produced the artwork and DECWAR was based on WAR, released the first public version also created at UT Austin, but for (v.0.70) of the WordPress 2 the CDC-6600 [Sept 00]. WAR ran on a single terminal, but could handle two players, and bore more than a passing resemblance to the “Star Trek” game [Sept 8]. In its day, “Star Trek” was very widely distributed and ported to multiple minicomputers and mainframes, its success aided by its appearance in David Ahl’s [May 17] “101 BASIC Computer Games” (1973). DECWAR 2.0 was released in July 1979, and evolved into MegaWars on CompuServe [Sept 24] after Bill Louden, who was in charge of its online games, bought a copy and became besotted. On this day, the University of Texas made DECWAR’s source code freely available at https://github.com/drforbin/de cwar, slightly modified to run on a PDP-10 emulator. iOS' Effective Power May 27, 2015 Amit Chowdhry of Forbes magazine reported that a new iOS bug allowed iPhone [Jan 9] users to crash another person’s iPhone by sending the text message: It turned out that the Unicode [June 17] string with Arabic characters could not be fully rendered.